


Regrowth

by moogle62



Category: Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Genre: F/M, Oral Sex, Post-Canon, Walks In The Woods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 17:46:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5465396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moogle62/pseuds/moogle62
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agnieszka’s wood-green cottage stands waiting for her when she leads Sarkan carefully by the hand back home. They wind through the trees together and only she does not flinch at the stray touch of branches. The Wood has known her too completely, now, for her to mistake friend for foe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Regrowth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lunabee34 (Lorraine)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, lunabee34! Uprooted was one of my favourite books of the year so getting to stick around in this universe for a bit this season was a brilliant Yuletide treat. <33

Agnieszka’s wood-green cottage stands waiting for her when she leads Sarkan carefully by the hand back home. They wind through the trees together and only Sarkan flinches at the stray touch of branches. The Wood has known Agnieszka too completely, now, for her to mistake friend for foe.

Sarkan’s step falters when they near Agnieszka’s home, her rough-hewn piece of sanctuary coaxed and cajoled out to her from the trees, but he does not stop still. Agnieszka runs her thumb over the tense line of his knuckles, gentles him on like a spooked horse. 

Inside, everything is as she left it. Her bed, counterpane neat and verdant; the table, whorled and knotted; the fruit standing golden in its woven basket, near the door. Sarkan’s breath catches as he crosses the threshold.

“It tastes of you,” he tells her, his eyes very grave. “The air in here tastes of your magic.”

Agnieszka could tell him there are other things she would like him to taste, could draw the sentiment out lewd and obvious, but instead she turns and draws his arms about her, letting herself rest against his chest. How long they have here, she doesn’t know. He has come to collect taxes, he says, the set of his mouth stubborn and unwilling to admit a lie told even for comfort, and Agnieszka makes herself hold it true until she has spoken proof that it is not.

So she does not tease him, not when he still holds himself like the wooden walls around them are yet to be mistrusted. She goes to her tiptoes - he is still just that bit taller, a familiar taunt now more than the affront it was - and brings their mouths together, kisses at his firm mouth until it gives, and he gives with it.

“There you are,” she whispers, and feels a shudder run through his hard-set shoulders. “Easy, now. We’re safe.”

“Don’t,” Sarkan rasps. Their faces are too close together now for Agnieszka to be able to make out his expression but his voice is rough as sandpaper. “Not yet. It’s not true yet.”

Her Sarkan, always so clear. This or that. His magic or no magic. The Wood, or the realm.

Agnieszka, as she has learned, has been an alloy since birth. Neither precious metal nor any common ore, she has played uncertain magic through her fingers and her blood and come out stronger for it every time. It is time Sarkan, too, breathed a little steadier away from the paper-dry air of his built-up tower walls.

“Then don’t you say it,” Agnieszka tells him now. They are still so caught up together that she can feel her breath brush against his lips as it leaves her own, a small ripple of possibility. “You don’t have to. Let me.”

She could stand in the middle of the room and whisper _hulvad, hulvad_ , could show him the cottage unchanging and untainted around them. She could breathe the _Summoning_ around them and show him the knot of fear in her chest, the nights she lay awake in her bed and thought of all the walkers roaming the dark woods outside, and the easy strength they had used to kill man after man before them. She could do any number of things, call upon any scrap of magic she could shape to suit - but then magic would have made Sarkan’s choice for him, and Agnieszka was not standing in her home and waiting for the Dragon to make his choice. There was a man in her arms, not any wizard of rank or appointed official of duty, and Agnieszka would have Sarkan’s own choice, or she would not have any of this at all

“Let me,” she repeats, and he shudders against her again. She takes his hands in hers and draws them up the sides of her dress, feels the warmth of his palms even through the simple material. His hands feel strong still, and powerful. 

They had raised beauty and catastrophe between them in spells before, and Sarkan had brought her to the brink of both with his clever fingers between her thighs in his bed the night before the end. Agnieszka wants him to know the same, and would see him tremble to achieve it.

“Let me,” she says, again, and this time she draws his hands under her skirts. Sarkan’s breath catches at the first brush of his palms against her skin, and Agnieszka too feels it, the quickening of her blood. Sarkan’s eyes have turned dark.

“Let me,” she says, invoking the strength of threes, and drops to the ground to kneel.

The mossy floor is soft beneath her knees. Sarkan’s thighs are hard-muscled beneath her hands. 

“What are you doing?” he asks, in a voice very removed from the legend of a man that stole women for his own.

She bids him quiet. “You don’t tolerate foolish questions,” she reminds him, and presses her mouth to the line of his desire, straining despite his hesitance.

Sarkan does more than catch his breath when Agnieszka draws down his trousers and gets her mouth on hot skin. Although he is not a loud man by nature when coupling, his hands, as always, speak for him. They tighten on her shoulders as she works her tongue, go tighter still when she abandons any tease and hollows out her cheeks.

Agnieszka has had his bed, his trust, and his magic. The pair of them have clung to life together in the middle of fire and death and ash, and Sarkan comes to her still only able to claim his duty as the reason. She knows the truth of it, and he knows she knows it - no mere duty would bring that man, any man, into the heart of the Wood that saw him charred and bloodied, without considerably more of a need than the touch of someone’s hand - but she would have the words from him.

But they have always spoken better in actions, the pair of them, and Agnieszka knows how to work with what she has.

“Nieshka,” he pleads, his voice coming taut and urgent, and she holds his hips hard enough that her fingers may mark him. She hopes they do. “Nieshka, please, I am - I will - _Nieshka_ , oh, _oh_ -” and he pulses, spends within her mouth.

He is still shaking, afterwards, when he draws her to her feet and kisses her so tenderly she feels it deep and sore in her heart.

“Well,” she says, her voice rough to her own ears, “are you going to tell me I’m impossible again?”

He laughs against her mouth. “Nothing about this place is possible,” he says, and gestures to the room around them, the green green floor, the vine-strewn walls. “Why should you be any different here than anywhere else?”

“I shouldn’t,” she agrees. “And neither should you.”

He’s holding up his trousers with one hand, his face still pinked from release. He is scowling, but she knows him now. This scowl is a sentiment other men would express with soft words, fond hands.

Agniezska does not want other men, just as Sarkan does not want other women. She wants her dragon with his banked or burning emotion, and he wants her, in all her tumultuous heartbeat glory.

They would not fit other people. Other people would catch themselves on their edges.

Agniezska had not thought of the consequences of this, the tumbling raw energy brought about by sex, its crackling, unbound potential let loose in the Wood so recently unchartable. She’s sure Sarkan will let her know how remiss she has been later, when she takes him by the hand and leads him through her familiar twisting pathways, shows him the still, clear ponds near the river, the calm canopies of contented trees. He will tell her she was foolish for it, but he will tighten his hand around hers, and she will know he sees it too, the transformation of the place. The way she and the Wood are kind to each other, now.

For now, however, there is only the two of them, bound up in each other like tended ivy. Sarkan goes to his knees for her as she sprawls over the edge of her bed and his tongue is proved as vicious at this work as any other, bringing her arching and gasping to release once, twice, a wonderfully punishing third. His mouth shines with her when she tugs at him and she tastes herself on his lips when they kiss. 

Outside, the sun is shining through the treetops, the light reaching them dappled and gentle through the cottage windows. Sarkan buries his head in the curve of her neck. They both of them are heaving for breath. 

“There,” she tells him, tells them both. “There now. We’re safe.”


End file.
